THE YES MEN AND ACTIVISM IN THE INFORMATION ... - Index of

Their feature film, The Yes Men, is reaching audiences who are not previously invested in
the actions of the WTO, and who therefore might exit the theater thinking about globalism for the
first time. Yet the fact that they have a feature film is another example of the group being co-
opted by the system it attacks. The Yes Men’s December 2004 appearance on the BBC as Dow
made international headlines and spawned scores of news articles, making the prank a bona fide
success in terms of exposure. After all, their goal is to “destabilize the system in such a way that
people might get a little entertainment and at the same time have those projects ask a few
questions of them.” 143 Yet, even though they caused Dow’s stock to drop temporarily, no change
has been made concerning Dow’s stance on Bhopal, and the Bhopali victims were fed with a false
hope, albeit just for two hours as opposed to the twenty years endured since the tragedy.
Though they attempt to attack and subvert the complacency of late capitalist culture, the
Yes Men are ultimately absorbed by the society they fight against, because they are artists who
have chosen to work within the corporate realm, rather than academia or the art world. And,
because of the nature of simulation, the Yes Men often copy their targets too closely for their
audiences to discern a difference, making their message unattainable. The drawbacks of such
simulation have impacted those within the art world as well, as Coco Fusco discovered. She
lamented that her Amer-Indians were taken for the real thing when she and Gomz-Peña were
placed on display in museums around the country. 144 She met with the same problems as the
Yes Men: her work was either taken for the real thing, not as a parody, or those who got the joke
143 Myerson, “The Art of Confusion.”
144 Fusco, 37-38.
65